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HackLibSchool, meet GradHacker.

I am pleased and honored to introduce something special that we are doing this week. We will be working with our colleagues over at GradHacker in a collaborative blog post-a-thon. Here at HackLibSchool you’ll be reading posts from some GradHacker writers, while we will be posting over there this week. Aside from a fun project, there is some depth here and a very important reason that this makes sense.

1. Library School students often get caught in library land and forget to think outside LIS. Actually, I think this is endemic of our field, and it needs to change. Collaboration across fields, ideas, disciplines, job titles, places of employment is what will define the future of information and its value to the world and librarians need to be on that boat. GradHacker has a great variety of interests and fields represented, and here at HLS we’ve tried to do the same, but only within LIS (finally an archivists point of view, but what about historians, engineers, archeologists, physicists?)

Collaboration is(will be) the currency of the information economy.

2. We are all grad students. Again, I hate to think I’ve perpetuated this even with the name of this blog, we, students in LIS programs, seem to get an identity crisis and think of ourselves as “library school students” and forget that we are also and more so grad students. There is a lot to unpack there that is related to questions of professionalization of our field, but as graduate students in Universities we have important ideas that are enlightened and useful for conversations and discussions around the academy. We are graduate students. Think, act, write, read, interact and explore like a grad student. It will raise our opinion of ourselves, and others’ opinions of us.

3. Technology allows and promotes us to have conversations in public with peers, colleagues and intellectuals. That is the driving force behind HackLibSchool, and GradHacker, and it is our duty and joy to take advantage of these conversations.

That said, I am very happy to welcome the GradHackers to our blog. Once you finish reading their posts here, go subscribe to their blog. Better yet, go write for them. Linked below are some recent posts I really enjoyed:

Personal note – I had the pleasure of meeting Katy and Alex, the lead editors of GradHacker, at THATCamp back in June. Aside from us all being intimidated by hanging around with every single Digital Humanities rockstar ever, we had some great conversations about grad school, blogging, scholarship in the digital age and life in general. They’re great, fascinating people (they study mortuary archaeology and Argentinean soccer! COMON!) and I am happy to support this project that they have taken on.

6 thoughts on “HackLibSchool, meet GradHacker.”

Yay! What a great idea. I love Grad Hacker as well. I think it’s a great opportunity for some new/fresh/extra topics here, especially since many library students are not only grad students simply because they are enrolled in graduate programs, but also because we are enrolled in dual degree programs to be subject librarians (or just because we like other subjects in the humanities).

Thanks so much for your comment. You know, there are a lot of folks who are pursuing the dual degree, and it isn’t something we’ve written about often here. Care to contribute a guest post on the topic? You’re absolutely right, that the dual degree is an important aspect of grad school and forces one to approach both degrees in different ways.